Throughout all testing, the same system was used for benchmarking. This system was built around a Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake CPU with MSI C236A Workstation motherboard. Thanks to MSI Computer for making this system comparison possible.

Here are more details on each of the distributions tested and a few notes about their default configuration:
- Fedora 23 was tested that with currently available updates pushes it to Linux 4.4, GNOME Shell 3.19.3, Mesa 11.1.0, and a GCC 5.3.1 compiler. Fedora 23 defaults to an EXT4 file-system, P-State CPU scaling driver, and CFQ I/O scheduler.
- Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS has the Linux 4.2 kernel, Mesa 11.0.2, GCC 4.8.4, EXT4, P-State driver, and deadline I/O scheduler.
- Ubuntu 15.10 has the Linux 4.2 kernel, Mesa 11.0.2, GCC 5.2.1, and EXT4 file-system.
- Ubuntu 16.04 LTS in its current development form with the Linux 4.4 kernel, Unity 7.4, Mesa 11.1.2, and GCC 5.3.1. Ubuntu 16.04 used the P-State driver and defaulted to the deadline I/O scheduler.
- Debian 8.3 has the Linux 3.16 kernel, Mesa 10.3.2, GCC 4.9.2, and it defaulted to the CPUFreq scaling driver with ondemand governor for this system. CFQ was the default I/O scheduler.
- Debian Testing for 9.0 Stretch had the Linux 4.3 kernel, Mesa 11.1.2, GCC 5.3.1, and defaulted to the CFQ I/O scheduler.
- CentOS 7 has the Linux 3.10 kernel, Mesa 10.6.5, GCC 4.8.5, and defaults to an XFS file-system. CentOS 7 was using CFQ and ACPI CPUFreq.